Resilience: Stories in lives of Nairobi women hawkers

At this time last year in Kenya, the most popular word on the lips of most politicians, and in the streets, was “hustler,” as the eventually triumphant presidential candidate William Ruto, and his hordes, sought to change the odds of having the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta on the side of his rival, Raila Odinga, by getting the proletariat vote.

The strategy worked, as many hawkers and ‘mama mbogas’ voted with their feet for the UDA.

Fast forward to the Goethe Institute on Monrovia Street where, recently, a book called Resilience: Stories in the Lives of Nairobi Women Hawkers was launched without too much pomp or popcorn, by AMKA Women Space’s director Dr Lydia W. Gaitiriria.

This book captures the actual domestic and street stories of the women who keep the ‘kadogo’ and ‘mitumba’ economy in the county, country, and even region going, even as they feed their families, and take their children to school, on their meagre (not to be mistaken with miserly) earnings.

‘Resilience’ is both the contemporary and archival 45 stories of a wide spectrum of women hawkers – from the fresh vegetable sellers to the flesh peddlers – on the streets of our metropolis; with the interviews taking place across 15 days. Three ladies got together to put this collection together.

Mary Rose Gichuru works as a financial advisor, but her background is in journalism. Because most of her interviews were with the women who sell along Thika Road — the runner hawkers, or the “Obiris” of the hawkers, her stories mirror her interviewees’ lives in terms of subjects (wares) but also in the style of writing.

Women whom, unlike those installed in markets or those with stalls, have between a minute to 10 minutes on a ‘good’ traffic day in Nairobi, when everything is as gridlocked, when it would be faster to walk than stay in the stalled traffic. 

These are the hawkers who sell all sorts of things imaginable: water, flowers, hangdog puppies, board games, sweets, potato crisps, fruits…name them. What they take home in profit at the end of the day depends on their swiftness and their ability to convince drivers and passengers to purchase.

She manages to capture these women’s lives wonderfully. The less-than-a-minute interactions, the initial irritabilities or impatience with hawkers. For instance, there’s Phyllis, the tea seller, who stifles a yawn when she introduces herself; Wangari who would not talk until she was assured her story would not be splashed all over media, and Njeri who ‘did not want to find myself on Facebook.’ They warm up to her eventually.

Mary Rose details their struggles, their after-sales triumphs, their failures, rejections and their determination to do it all over again, the following day, from Monday to Saturday, ‘maandamano’ or no, and this documentation is central to the importance of Resilience.

Financial problem

In the end, most of the interviewees seem to face the same sort of problem —financial — varied in different forms including inadequate capital and the inability to save, as they have no extra coin left over. And it occurs to the reader that the basic sum it takes to keep a hustler’s family going in this city is Sh500, which is why the rising cost of living is so devastating to the common mwananchi.

Beverly Nasimiyu’s 10 ‘hawker’ tales, though, are the ones that open the collection. A horticulture major, currently working as a digital marketer, Beverly conducted most of her interviews with the women sellers around the Thika and Roysambu areas.

From a pudding maker (with an unlikely liking, or unhealthy appetite, for sports gambling), a putative goat farmer, a candy seller to a miraa hawker, Beverly’s stories tell of the lives of these women who litter the streets of Thika town every day with their wares.

Like a bouquet of tulips dotted with daisies, something which Nasimiyu must surely know a lot about, her writing is simple yet pleasant. Her descriptions of places and settings is her biggest asset. For instance, in ‘All in Due Time’ she sets the scene as: “It is an array of items, a muted cacophony of colour. Pedestrians shuffle along, with most in too much of a hurry to dilly-dally over the pleasant sights. A babel rises and falls from above…”

Beverly has a bias, when it comes to style, for beautiful, colourful, flowery words which she uses generously, carefully picked out like plucking petals off thorny plants: ‘punnet…putative…gooey…’ And yet they don’t stick out like a plant-pricked sore thumb, and indeed add a charm to the oft grim subject matter in this collection.

Gloriah Amondi is, without dispute, the true storyteller of the trio of writers, and her 19 stories of women hawkers close off the collection on an often haunting note.

Her interview, ‘A House of Coffins’ opens with this paragraph: “There is a soft sadness that hits you when you enter Carol’s Funeral Place. It is soft and distant, perhaps — in my case — from the relief of knowing that what brings you there is not to buy a coffin, or perhaps because Purity, the funeral parlour girl has a soft smile, and warm, harmless eyes, devoid of the hardness that often come with frequent interactions with death.”

During the book launch, it was revealed that she is a recently graduated lawyer (never practised), mainstream newspaper writer and the ‘Gloria’ (with a ‘h’) on the BikoZulu blog and that she teaches Mandarin to little kids at a private academy, after corona forced her out of China in 2020.

Unlike Mary Rose who takes a journalistic approach to the collection, Gloriah Amondi opts for a more humanising angle. She tells these women’s stories in the form of everyday life stories, almost similar to the ‘Humans of New York’ form.

In this collection, her writing reminds me of Martin Amis’ Visiting Mrs Nabokov. Like Amis, her approach combines critical journalistic prose with powerful openings and humanisation of not only her characters, but the writer herself — for instance, Catherine the shoe shiner laughs nervously when the interviewer complements her for not looking her age — because it’s possible it’s something she constantly thinks about, and wants other people to notice; while Purity, the other Purity, the one that sells Sim cards (and not coffins) asks if the interviewer can get her a scholarship.

The result is a powerful and diverse chain of tales that opens the lives of these women hawkers to the reader in a natural, easy, but also impressive way in terms of tale-telling technique.

Amondi also has a commendable list of interviewees. She went out of her way to seek stories from beyond the conventional ‘hawking’ to write about the unconventional such as flesh peddling and even the wine-and-spirit selling Mwende who relies on a ‘mubaba’ to pay for her saloon (and salon too) after getting tired of ‘watching Netflix series hall day has hi for him to come for his quickie fix.’

These women, like Susan Mwende, occupy polar spaces in a very natural but distinct way.

There is a duality, to a desirable degree, to almost each and every one of them:

Joy, the strip dancer has a shy, child-like demeanor. When asked her name, she mouths, ‘Joy’, and “for a moment she looks a little embarrassed as if it’s a terrible thing to have joy in a place like that.”

Purity, the Coffin Seller, lacks the “hardness that often comes with frequent interactions with death”

And the women in Ngara, competitors by their own rights, refer customers to each other (even when the customer has purchased nothing from them,) and further alert one another when the Kanjo (Municipal askaris), “those Nairobi Vultures that walk on two feet”, approach to ambush ...

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